I was curious whether the Crosby's Fancy Molasses that CDNpielover has been using is sold in the U.S. I had seen signs that at one time Amazon apparently carried the product but that no longer seems to be the case. So, I called Crosby's in Canada and spoke to one of their customer service reps. She told me that the Crosby's Fancy Molasses is available in the U.S. from two sources, The first is Hannaford, a regional chain of supermarkets in the northeast part of the U.S. The second is via an online source called East Coast Catalogue. That is a company that ships products from Canada, including the Crosby's molasses, into the U.S.

I also asked the Crosby's rep whether a molasses product called Grandma (without the apostrophe s) was one of their products. What prompted my question was a photo that I saw at http://nomadicrkitekt.blogspot.com/2011/11/authenticity-vs-nostalgia.html where a container of Grandma molasses (melasse) is shown next to a container of Crosby's Fancy Molasses. The label on the container of Grandma molasses shows the face of a lady, just as the label of the Grandma's molasses (with the apostrophe s) in the U.S. shows an image of a lady, for example, as shown at http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/27535_109077409118340_5758_n.jpg. As it turns out, the Grandma molasses is a Crosby's product but it has no relationship to the Grandma's molasses in the U.S. And there is no licensing or other relationship with the U.S. Grandma's.

great work, Peter! If it would be useful for you to get your hands on some Crosby's Fancy Molasses (?), let me know and we can probably arrange something. I just don't know how easy it is to ship foodstuffs internationally and through customs.

If it would be useful for you to get your hands on some Crosby's Fancy Molasses (?), let me know and we can probably arrange something. I just don't know how easy it is to ship foodstuffs internationally and through customs.

CDNpielover,

Thank you very much for the kind offer. However, I have a friend who lives near one of the Hannaford supermarkets in Massachusetts and I may have him check out the Crosby's molasses to be sure that it is the Crosby's Fancy Molasses (Gold Star). If it is, I can ask him to ship me a bottle. As a result of this thread, I have become a certified molassologist that I should be able to assess and diagnose the product in all of its manifestations .

I have been lurking on this thread for a few months now and have tried a few of the dough recipes in the thread. I'm pretty much a novice at making pizza dough, so this thread has been eye-opening.

I must quickly say that the dough recipes are coming out well in my hands, but I have never gotten one to be able to be worked like the MM videos. I am guessing that it has something to do with the way I'm handling the dough ball after it is prepared that is my problem. Here's what I've been doing. I mix the ingredients either with a table knife until it balls up or with short bursts of a food processor (plastic blade). I knead the dough for about 5 minutes by hand. Tweaking the hydration up occasionally to make the dough a little easier to ball. I use cold water in the preparation of the dough and the dough goes into the refrigerator starting at about 50-55įF in a plastic sealed storage container slightly oiled. I bring it out of the refrigerator about 20 hours later and let it warm at room temperature. The dough can be pressed out to about 8 inches (for a 14" skin) and then I start to stretch it on my hands. The dough typically does not extend very easily and it tends to contract back. It is not easy to stretch to the full diameter and tends to thin in some areas before others.

For the record, I'm pretty much following the recipes posted on this thread by Norma and Pete although I've been using small amounts of black strap molasses 2.5 baker's %, since that's what's on my shelf at the moment, and 10% sugar. Effective hydration has ranged from 57.8% to 60%

Can anyone tell from this what I might be doing wrong to get the Mellow Mushroom easily stretched dough?

Would it be possible for you to post the entire dough formulation you used? I'd like to calculate the amount of water in your dough as a percentage of the total dough ball weight. Based on the hydration bake tests that we have conducted to date, it should be pretty close to 40%. I'd also like to calculate the "adjusted" hydration that takes the water content of the blackstrap molasses into account and also to calculate the "effective" hydration that also takes the oil into account. Can you tell me what brand of blackstrap molasses you have been using? I know the amount is small but I'd like to take all of the numbers into account.

Pending your reply, I'd like to make a few comments and observations on MM doughs in general. Real MM doughs use high-gluten flour, or so we have been told by MM, both in published reports and officially by MM customer service reps. A typical rated absorption value for high-gluten flour is around 63%. Our work to date points to a formula hydration for the MM clones doughs of around 51%, and we believe that the corresponding value for a real MM dough is in the same ballpark. That 51% number goes up when the water content of the molasses is taken into account. Also, the wetting effect of the oil effectively increases that value by around 2.6% (in the most recent MM clone doughs we have been making). With values like these, the MM clone doughs are likely to be quite elastic, even when the dough has undergone a reasonable amount of fermentation (cold fermentation in your case) or the dough has been defrosted the proper amount of time and also given a good amount of time to temper at room temperature before using.

It is also important to keep in mind that the MM clone dough balls that we make with home mixers, whether a stand mixer or a bread maker or a food processor (in your case and mine), are likely not to be of the same robust quality as produced by MM in its commissary using commercial mixers, dividers and rounders. I know that some of the videos we have seen show what appears to be more extensibility in the doughs than some of those we have made at home. However, I tend to view such videos with some suspicion because I don't know how the dough balls were prepped to go before the camera. The videos I am most likely to believe are the ones showing dough balls being opened at an MM store in a live, unrehearsed, spontaneous setting, such as the videos that Norma took when she visited the Washington, DC MM location.

Norma might also want to offer commentary on her experience with the MM clone doughs. She has been using high-gluten flour, whereas I have been using King Arthur bread flour supplemented by vital wheat gluten in order to get the protein content for the blend to around 14-14.2% (and sometimes around 13.5%). Of course, we may not have been getting everything right. What has complicated matters, and the calculations as well, is not knowing what MM is using for molasses. That can change the numbers in a way to suggest that MM is using a higher hydration than we now believe. But what I feel quite certain about, based on our hydration bake tests, is that the total water content is around 40%. So, unless MM is using some extraordinary form of molasses, or doing something that they have been concealing to date, the formula hydration is not likely to go much higher than around 51%.

The MM clone doughs I have been working with are easy to open in my opinion, but then I do open dough balls every week. Did you watch the videos I posted of the MM employees opening MM dough balls at and

What does you dough ball look like before you try to open the dough ball? Does it have any fermentation bubbles on the bottom? Do you know what final dough temperature your dough is after mixing? I donít really know why you skin would want to contract back.

If I can be of any help in specifically telling you what I do when I open a MM clone dough let me know and I will tell you exactly how I open the MM clone dough balls.

I whisk together the flour, gluten, and yeast; dissolve the salt, molasses, and sugar in the water (lots of stirring to dissolve the molasses); and pulse the dry mix, water mix, and the oil in a "20-cup" Cuisinart food processor until the ball forms. I then knead it by hand for about 5 minutes. I place it in a plastic storage food container, lightly oiled. And place it in the refrigerator. About 20 hours later the ball has risen about 50% (rough guess) and I bring it out to the room to warm for 3-4 hours. I have also put it into a proofing oven for about 30 min before handling it to get some more fermentation. There is good sign of fermentation, with bubbles on the bottom of the ball in the container. (Sorry, no photos. Perhaps on next batch.)

The dough simply can not be handled the way I have watched them at the local Mellow Mushroom in Cary, North Carolina or on the personal videos posted.

I will await until Peter has time to go over your MM clone formulation, mixing methods, and fermentation until I answer. I canít figure out your MM formulation. Since Peter also uses a food processor maybe he can give you some help on your mixing method. I use my Kitchen Aid mixer to mix my MM clone doughs.

Did you ever try to freeze your dough ball after mixing? That is what Peter and I have been doing in most of the experiments.

Interesting that you did get to watch MM employees in Cary, North Carolina open their dough balls.

Thank you for the details of the MM clone dough formulation you used. As a point of clarification, I assume that you meant to say that you added the salt to the water and molasses and sugar, not to the other dry ingredients (flour, vital wheat gluten and yeast). Is that correct?

Using the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html, and also the Mixed Mass Percentage Calculator at http://foodsim.toastguard.com/, I converted your recipe to the dough formulation format as set forth below. I also calculated the percent of water in your MM clone dough, the "adjusted" hydration that takes into account the water content of the Plantation blackstrap molasses (I assumed 21% water), and the "effective" hydration that also takes the oil (2.554%) into account. I also came up with a sucrose equivalency value. I'd like to commend you for the very nice and meticulous job you did in creating your MM clone recipe. The numbers lined up nicely, although I think I may have diagnosed the problem, about which I will have more to say below.

Here is what your MM clone dough formulation looks like, together with the related metrics:

*The KABF/VWG Blend comprises 300 grams KABF and 9.3 grams Hodgson Mill vital wheat gluten, with a total protein content of 14.32%.Note: Dough is for a single 14" pizza; no bowl residue compensation

Related Metrics:Percent of water in the dough = 40.95% (this is a bit high but not too far out of line)Nominal "Adjusted" hydration = 57.52%Nominal "Effective" hydration = 60.08%Sucrose equivalency = 11.48%

After taking everything into account, I think your problem is related to the amount of sugar you used. What you did was creative in seeking a combination of ordinary table sugar and a small amount of the Plantation blackstrap molasses that would give you both sweetness and flavor in the finished crust and color in the dough and finished crust, much like brown sugar would, but I think that the large amount of sugar (about 10%) had the effect of lowering the formula hydration. Sugar is a hygroscopic ingredient. That means that it attracts water from its surroundings. Molasses is also a hygroscopic ingredient, maybe even more so than sugar, but at about 2.5%, its impact is likely to be slight. Since sugar is dry, you effectively have to take that dryness into account in arriving at a final hydration value. For example, if we were to add the sugar to the KABF/VWG blend for hydration calculation purposes, and accounting for the water in the molasses, the hydration becomes 52.3%, which is much lower than the nominal adjusted hydration value noted above. Adding the oil percent to that number, we get an effective hydration of 54.85%. If my analysis is correct, that would be too low, and may well have contributed to the increased elasticity you experienced. If you had added other dry ingredients to your mix, such as whey, dry milk powder, more vital wheat gluten, etc., you would have experienced a similar hydration deficiency. People often fail to take these effects into account when they decide to modify an existing dough formulation by adding other ingredients. In your case, it was a dry ingredient but the same problem occurs when people add wet ingredients, except in that case the formula hydration has to be lowered rather than raised.

To the above, I would add that when sugar gets above about 5% in a dough formulation, it has an osmotic effect on the yeast that can impair its performance. That seems not to have been a problem in your case. Sometimes the effect of too much sugar can be offset to a degree by using more yeast, and maybe that was the case with your dough since the amount of yeast I have been recommending is higher than normal.

In terms of altering your MM dough clone formulation to make it more workable, as by increasing the formula hydration, I would have to spend some time playing around with possible solutions. For example, increasing the formula hydration might have the effect of increasing the total water content of the dough above around 40%, which is the value our hydration bake tests have established for a real MM dough. There is not much that can be done with the molasses since there is too little of it.

In a sense, I think you may have wandered too far off of the MM reservation with your particular MM clone dough formulation but if you would like me to try to repair it, I am willing to give it the old college try.

I contacted Groeb Farms about a sample request for their unsulphured Golden A Molasses product. I didnít know what their molasses product was like, but it said it was sweet and fancy. The ingredients just say cane molasses. I received the gallon sample today and also the specs for the Groeb Farms Golden A Molasses. It says on the specs that the sugar amount is 14 grams per tablespoon, so it is like the Grandmaís Original Molasses. I tasted the Golden A Molasses and it doesnít taste like Grandmaís Original, but tastes like the Golden Barrel Supreme Baking Molasses with the blackstrap molasses added. I donít know if Groeb Farms adds any blackstrap molasses to their Golden A Molasses or not.

The MM clone experiments I did yesterday with the Grandmaís Original Molasses with KASL and the one with Homemaid Molasses and ADM Gigantic Flour turned out almost the same. The only differences were the first experiment with the Grandmasí Original Molasses with KASL the crumb seemed a little airier. The second experiment with the Homemaid Molasses and the ADM bromated Gigantic Flour the crumb seemed a little denser and looked a little denser. The second experiment did look like it had better oven spring, but that could have been how I opened the dough ball.

Both experiments were light in color in the dough and crumb and had about the same amount of sweetness in the crust.

The first two MM pictures were just taken with different settings on my camera. It shows how different setting do change pictures.

Thanks, Pete, for your careful analysis of my recipe, and, yes, I fumbled and should not have included the salt in the dry mixture. It was added to the liquid mixture of water, molasses, and sugar. I will revise my original post for posterity.

I think I am a little confused about the hydration numbers. Your numbers are the numbers I, too, calculated and thought that the values are right in line with the target. How are these different than what I've been seeing for the MM clones in this thread? I assume I am missing something fundamental here.

I think I am a little confused about the hydration numbers. Your numbers are the numbers I, too, calculated and thought that the values are right in line with the target. How are these different than what I've been seeing for the MM clones in this thread? I assume I am missing something fundamental here.

Fred,

The main point I was trying to make in Reply 1383 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3940.msg172042.html#msg172042 is that the most important hydration value is the final "effective" hydration value, not the formula hydration value. In Reply 1383, I tried to draw a distinction between the "nominal" effective hydration value (recited in Related Metrics), which does not take the large amount of sugar into account, and the final effective hydration value that does take the sugar into account. For some time, the effective hydration values for the MM clone doughs have been running around 57-58%. Previously, they were lower, typically by a couple percent. What changed things were two events. The first was the publication by MM of its Nutrition Facts. The second event was Norma taking delivery of a real MM dough on which to conduct experiments, notably the hydration bake test but also the gluten mass test. Those two things allowed me to tweak values better but they also suggested that we should use higher effective hydration values. I should also mention that there is no single value of effective hydration. It is different for each type of molasses product and has to be calculated each time. And those changes can require changes in the other ingredients used in the dough formulations. Each MM clone dough formulation is in essence an original formulation custom tailored to the particular application.

When I was analyzing your dough formulation, my thought was that perhaps the formula hydration you used could be increased by a few percent, maybe to around 60% in order to raise the value of the effective hydration (to something around 57-58%). That was never necessary before because all of the MM clone dough formulations I came up with (I am now up to number 37) had molasses as the principal sweetener, not sucrose (table sugar). Most recently, I have been using from about 11-19% liquid molasses. After I posted in Reply 1383, I tentatively concluded that your dough formulation might not meet other tests for a real MM dough, not from a sugars standpoint (because the table sugar is all sucrose) but because of the lesser amounts of sugars in the blackstrap molasses. However, that is not fatal. If you can get the necessary hydration, you should still be able to make a credible MM clone. I would think that a sucrose equivalency of 11.48%, based mostly on the table sugar (blackstrap molasses has almost no sugar), would make for an especially sweet crust, and maybe too sweet.

The other thought that occurred to me after I posted is to let the MM clone dough ferment for longer than 20 hours. We have been working mainly with defrosted MM clone dough balls although MM does deliver fresh dough balls to its stores in the Atlanta market. I have no idea as to how long those dough balls are usable but most companies that deliver refrigerated dough balls to their stores, such as Papa John's and Papa Gino's, among others, do twice a week deliveries. I assume the fresh dough balls are used fresh and not frozen at the store level for later use.

Pete, I must be a dunce, but I'm still not understanding why you are saying the effective hydration of my recipe is off. You suggested that I should raise the formula hydration to about 60% to get the effective hydration up to 57-58%, but you calculated in Reply #1383 that my effective hydration is already at 60.08%, and the formula hydration (water only) is 57%. Am I reading the numbers your calculated incorrectly?

The target numbers I was referring to in Reply 1383 are 52.3% and 54.85%. These are the numbers that I thought might be too low.

Perhaps if I show you a couple of examples--a typical one such as I have been creating that uses all liquid molasses, and your formulation that uses mostly sugar and a small amount of molasses--and how I calculate the numbers.

Consider first the MM clone dough formulation that I came up with for CDNpielover at Reply 1372 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3940.msg171693.html#msg171693. That formulation has 315.85 grams of flour, 162.03 grams of water, 53.69 grams of molasses, and 2.6% oil. The particular type and brand of the molasses used in this formulation contains 20% water. The "adjusted" hydration as I use that calculation is [(0.20 x 53.69) + 162.03)/315.85] = 54.87%. To get the "effective" hydration as I use that calculation, I add the oil percent to that number. In this example, we get an "effective" hydration of 54.87% + 2.6% = 57.47%.

In your case, you are using a flour blend of 309.3 grams, 176.3 grams of water, 30.9 grams of sugar, 7.7 grams of molasses, and 2.554% oil. I do not have the specs for the Plantation blackstrap molasses that you used, so I used 20% as the amount of water in that product. For these numbers, I calculated the "adjusted" hydration as follows:

[(0.20 x 7.7) + 176.3]/[(30.9 + 309.3)] = 52.3%.

To get the "effective" hydration, I add 2.554% to the above number, to get 52.3% + 2.554% = 54.8%.

The above is the only way that I know to adjust for the changes you made to the MM clone dough formulation you worked from. The only other way I would be able to tell if your formulation produces comparable results would be to actually try the formulation.

Thanks, again, Pete for the detailed explanation. I understand your point now. I also must conclude that the effective hydration calculation in the Related Metrics of your Reply #1383 is simply incorrect based on what you have said. Are you suggesting that the formula should be changed to include other dry ingredients such as sugar?

If the effective hydration figure is an important index, then it seems that my recipe is a good example of how the current formula is deficient. Of course, I have no idea of the history of using the effective hydration value, but if you think my adding sugar to the recipe reveals that the current formula for effective hydration is inadequate, then it seems it is time to change the formula.

Of course, I will soon try a recipe in which I drop the sugar by half and boost the effective hydration to something like 57% including the sugar content in the calculation and see if working the dough becomes easier.

The concept of "effective hydration" is not new although I started to use the expression "effective hydration" to describe the effects of wet ingredients like oil on the final hydration of a dough. For example, if a flour has a rated absorption of 63% and you use a formula hydration of 63% along with another wet ingredient, like oil, the dough will seem wetter than normal. That is because ingredients like oil have a "wetting" effect on the dough. The same thing would happen if you added eggs, honey, syrups of various kinds, or anything else that contains a liquid. If those ingredients are added to an existing dough formulation, you have to back off on the formula hydration to compensate for the water content of those ingredients. When I came up with the basic Papa John's clone dough formulation, which includes around 7% oil, I could not use a formula hydration of say, 63% for a high-gluten flour, because the combination, 63% + 7%, would yield an "effective hydration" of 70%. That would have been too high. So, I lowered the formula hydration to around 56% so that the sum of the formula hydration (56%) and 7% oil would come to 63%--which is equal to the rated absorption of the flour. Not long after I started to use this method, I read a post by Tom Lehmann at the PMQ Think Tank that gave the same advice except that he didn't give the approach a name. "Effective hydration" also works in reverse, as when dry ingredients are added to an existing recipe except that the formula hydration has to be increased to compensate for the dryness of those ingredients.

In this thread, I also came up with an expression "adjusted hydration". That expression takes into account only the effects of the water content of the molasses. We have known for quite a long time that the MM dough contains molasses. Only molasses. No other sugars or sweeteners. MM and its franchisees have also said that that there are no refined white sugars in their dough. This has been MM's position consistently since 1974 when Mellow Mushroom was founded. So, your recipe with refined white sugar would not pass muster as a credible clone of the MM dough. We debated at length whether raw cane sugar (aka turbinado) or brown sugar was a "refined white sugar", especially since sugar producers tout the "pure" and "natural" merits of those sugars, but we conclued that those sugars were most likely refined. We also ruled out a combination of liquid molasses and honey once we learned that honey is not a vegan ingredient. MM touts the vegan nature of all of their food items and, when confronted with the honey issue, told us that they don't use honey. Your combination of table sugar and the Plantation blackstrap molasses is really a form of brown sugar, except in your case you are using more molasses than is ordinarily added to white sugar to make it into a brown sugar.

As previously mentioned, our efforts to reverse engineer and clone the MM dough started to pay dividends once MM published its Nutrition Facts and Norma ended up with a real MM dough on which to conduct experiments from which we were able to come up with some very useful data to help us get closer on formula hydration, total water content, and amounts of molasses to use. That helped me to refine the "adjusted hydration" an "effective hydration" calculations. We still don't know exactly what form or brand of molasses is using in its commissary but our members have been getting good results with several molasses products. They are all in liquid form with no other sweeteners added even though other sweeteners will work reasonably well with molasses. The sole purpose of this thread has been to reverse engineer and clone a real MM dough, not to come up with adaptations along the lines you have been considering.

I had contacted B&G Food, Inc. and asked them if I could have the specs for the Grandmaís Original Molasses and also the Brer Rabbit Mild Flavored Molasses. They sent the specs to me in the mail. These are the specs for both molasses products.

I thought just for the heck of it to see what would happen I tried the Golden A Molasses in the MM#7 formulation. I got Bob out again and compared him to the dough ball before it had cornmeal on it. I thought the Golden A Molasses had tasted like it had blackstrap molasses in it when I first tasted it. I think, but am not sure, that I am getting better at just tasting molasses products to see how sweet they are and also to know if blackstrap molasses might be added. I really donít know if blackstrap molasses is added in the Golden A Molasses product from Groeb Farms. This dough ball compared to Bob is darker in color. The Golden A Molasses has 14 grams of sugar for a tablespoon. I also used KASL in this MM#7 clone formulation.

Again, many thanks, Pete, for your further explanation. I understand perfectly the purpose of this thread and that my addition of table sugar is not in line with that purpose. I must admit that I never intended to be a real contributor to the advancement of the knowledge on the clone recipe, I just like the MM pizza crust and wanted to make something similar. Surely you would agree that one would not have to exactly match all the same ingredients as MM to produce a reasonably similar tasting/feeling pizza, especially if the only departure is whether it is vegan or not.

You will recall that my original post was in regard to my problems working the dough, and I needed to get the experts' opinions about what could have been causing my problems. The hydration level was naturally a key parameter in that regard, which is how we got into the excellent tutorial you have so graciously offered. I just didn't understand why the effective hydration level would not automatically include an ingredient like sugar in the calculation. My question about the hydration calculation was never in defense of putting sugar in the recipe.

I promise not to continue to post my off-target recipes on this thread. I did not mean to side-track anyone. Just a newbie trying to literally throw (or stretch or press out) a decent pizza skin.

Unfortunately, this thread has become principally a mathematical exercise. The main reason is because there are so many different forms and brands of molasses and molasses-like products. Life would have been much easier if we knew, and could have procured, the specific type and brand of molasses MM has been using. I have been collecting data and specs on ten different types/brands of molasses and molasses-type products to date, and Norma is about to add #11 (the Golden A molasses from Groeb Farms). Among the members, I believe that we have tested about eight or nine of the products. Most of these can be ruled out for cloning purposes because, used alone, they do not have enough sugars and they are too dark. That is especially true with blackstrap molasses. They would have to be combined with something else.

One of the dough formulations that I tried that I liked even though it did not qualify as a legitimate MM clone dough included a combination of molasses (7% Grandma's Original molasses) and honey (6% clover honey). I have been so preoccupied with new MM clone dough formulations that I haven't had a chance to retry the molasses-honey formulation to see if I still think that the results are worthy. But, to your point, there are indeed many formulations that will work and produce good results even if they do not pass muster as credible MM clone doughs.